Living in Mexico: Random Thoughts

It is always a treat to receive letters from readers who read what I crank out. I never expect agreement with that which I put into the public eye. Oh no. In fact, one of the reasons I write what I do is I desire to stir up debate. I truly desire for readers to challenge me. I desire discourse. I desire to read from those responses well-constructed, well-reasoned, and logical counter-arguments to the things I say.

What is so utterly disappointing is I so rarely get that which I desire.

I don't know if it's that they cannot or will not take up the task of thinking clearly. Maybe they can't do it about anything at all, I just don't know. Is it a matter of their will, or their lack of ability? Perhaps critical thinking threatens to give them a brain tumor.

I personally cannot think of another reason why they wouldn't want to engage in the Free Exchange of the Market Place of Ideas.

No matter the naysayers, there are two sides to the Expatriation Gig to Mexico and most other countries. What I write about has been written before by other more notable authors about how Americans act when they move overseas for whatever reasons. The tendency to create Gringo Enclaves, or Gringolandias, is nothing new. It's been happening almost forever. The point is that no one challenges it. No one writes about it anymore. There are no more harbingers.
If you want to know what the past authors have recorded as one of the chief complaints the local populations have had about Americans, it is their isolationist tendencies. When most Americans move to other lands, for any reason at all, they will create isolated enclaves. The locals see it as arrogance. The racists' phrase, "We want to mix with our own kind," has been uttered more than once from the expat communities in San Miguel de Allende and here in Guanajuato. Yet, if you write about it, some of them threaten to do you in.

That's right, they threaten you.

There a small book you can read called The Ugly American. In it, you can read accounts about Americans in Asia. If you do read it, you will find an interesting Epilogue in the back in which the authors explain their fictionalizing of actual events in the Foreign Service in Southeast Asian during the late fifties. The blatant refusal to learn the language of the local population is still in effect today. The Foreign Service still requires no foreign language component in order to be hired. It is the same today as it was in 1958.

The tendency of Americans to isolate themselves into enclaves is just as prevalent today as it was in the fifties.

Most of the expatriate-to-Mexico books on the market cover the advantages-all that is light-of expatriating to Mexico. None cover the disadvantages. They wouldn't dare, I suppose, since it would buy them trouble. Lots and lots of trouble.

There are two sides. There is a dark side to expatriating to Mexico and that dark side lies in the American Gringos who populate their enclaves with no legal restraints whatsoever over their behavior.

The restraining influence of America's laws don't reach this far and the gringos know this. How are you going to sue someone for seeking to cause you harm? How will you seek redress in Mexico? That's what's so dark about them. They are lawless and can do pretty much what they want, to whom they want, and get by with it.

Maybe that's ultimately it. They are anarchists. That's what's so attractive about living in Mexico.

Lawlessness.